story
The people behind Slack, Spotify, and so on have actually commented on these threads explaining the exact line of reasoning. This stuff isn't limited to just CSS, and it makes total business sense to avoid it.
(This is like the obviously silly quote "we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume!" translated into "this rich environment and set of libraries enables such amazing developer productivity that we can create much better optimized user experiences!" while the laggyness and flakyness and huge memory use are just never optimized away with that productivity.)
I dunno, Discord might be gunning for that prize.
Which 99% of users never care about. The idea that large memory usage is a negative business driver is almost laughable at this point, yet for some reason it is a huge pet peeve among lots of technologists.
I partly manage a team of end-user support people, and the number of tickets they get with "my computer is slow!" is astonishing.
The number of times it's found that they have Slack eating over half the RAM of their corporate-issued laptop (read: wimpy specs) is huge.
The number of people who understand that Slack being an insane resource hog is a large part of what is making their daily computing business painful is the inverse.
The only debatable question is whether the exact memory overhead (of electron for example) on the specific user machines existing out there today will make a noticeable loading time or lag difference. For many users it seems it does, not everyone has the lastest hardware.
People quite obviously care about speed and latency issues, but they might not be able to pinpoint slack or discord, etc as the root cause.
The desire to use new features as soon as possible is driver enough I feel. Imagine having to wait years for parity between 6 different operating systems before being able to use classes, a language feature introduced years ago and that still isn't fully supported today.
What they really want to do is make that web app installable in the OS, no? I use WebPin to "install" websites (until this works natively in Firefox with PWAs) a lot of the time, even when they offer electron bundles (with the browser I already have, nodejs I already have ...).
